Don't sleep on Trinity

80

I've been testing Trinity the last few days, and I think it's really being slept on. Yes, it's 100 spirit, kind of confusing when you first read it, and it was straight up crashing the game at launch so I get why it got pushed aside. But it can be 50-70% more elemental damage, or 2-3 extra support gems worth of damage on all your elemental attacks.

Wall of text incoming, but I think there's some nuances to this that are important to describe beyond just damage numbers.

What is Trinity?

https://poe2db.tw/us/Trinity
Basically, Trinity has 2 buff levels for each of the 3 elements (excluding chaos), for a total of 6 possible buff levels. Each current buff level grants you up to 12% more elemental damage from just the gem and quality.
Because it removes 2 resonance from the elements that weren't the highest hit, you can only practically have 5 buff levels at any time. If you're just using one element, you'll only generate resonance for that element and cap out at 2 buff levels, or 24% more damage. Still pretty good but not as good as trying for 2 or 3 elements.

There's a lot of options for generating more resonance types, like heralds converted to types other than your main skill.

How can we use this?

The most straightforward way to generate a lot of resonance is to use Painter's Servant
https://poe2db.tw/us/Painters_Servant
My understanding of how these work is they take all of your elemental damage, add it up into one big pool then spread it evenly across fire, cold and lightning. This happens after conversions on your skill gems, so for example Lightning Spear converts 80 or 100% of physical damage to lightning, and all of that is added to the pool and split 3 ways as well. Any added flat damage is converted as well. The only thing that's outside of the even split is "damage as extra" mods, those happen after conversion.

So if you're trying to evenly split, a pair of painter's with the same roll on all elements is ideal, a single skill can raise all 3 resonance at once. Just make sure to be careful about sources of "gained as extra" like Ice Bite, Innervate, and other gear, gems or passives that can provide that, unless you want certain skills to be skewed to one element or another.

Dealing all 3 elements at once has the upside of access to all elemental ailments as well, so for example Amazon's infuse weapon, even when lightning infused is still able to freeze or ignite. Especially important in combination with Combat Frenzy, we can easily Freeze to generate frenzy charges this way.

Splitting elements does present some challenges though. Resistance shred is harder for one, there's a pretty limited amount of elemental penetration that applies to all elements, and we don't have anything like "Elemental Weakness" curse in PoE2 yet. With the penetration on the tree, and a soul core in the weapon we can hit 42% penetration which is good for most cases. Pinnacles have 50% res, and penetration can't cause resistances to go below zero, so we're mostly covered even in the worst case. Effects like Heavy Frost, Coming Calamity or Beacon of Azis to ignore resistances are also handy.

Ok, but how do I fit 100 more spirit?

Well, the most straightforward way is a Sceptre offhand. On Amazon, Lycosidae is the hyped offhand (or Sacred Flame if you're rich), but Accuracy has massive diminishing returns. So doubling it doesn't anywhere near double the benefits you get from accuracy. For me, it's around a 20% DPS increase, which is nothing compared to what Trinity does. In the right setup, Trinity can even outperform Sacred Flame. And because Sacred Flame is "as extra", it will always mess with Trinity making them mostly incompatible, at least with the tools we have right now.

https://poe2db.tw/us/Sceptres

A Sceptre rolls 100 spirit at base, but can roll explicit mods to increase that to over 200. They also come with free auras, like Malice, Purities or Discipline. Personally, I run discipline for 200+ base ES to make up some of the defense loss of running with no shield. Malice is cool on paper, but unless you're a melee build, most things aren't going to be in your "presence" long enough for it to do anything. They can also roll mana and Strength or Intelligence to help with your stats, save some suffixes elsewhere.

What does this all look like?

Here's my very work in progress PoB on LS Amazon: https://poe2.ninja/pob/2720

The sceptre offhand gives me enough spirit for Trinity, Ghost Dance, Wind Dancer, Combat Frenzy, Herald of Thunder and I still have spirit left over for another Herald or some persistent support gems. My gear is pretty mid, lots of 5-10ex pieces and a couple good ones. CI "From Nothing" jewel gets you Heavy Frost, which makes sure bosses hit 0 resists even after map mods.

I was hoping Elemental Sundering would play into all this, as I'm able to apply all the ailments between Infusion and Storm Lance, but that skill is very weird. The animation causes a big delay between pressing it and actually doing damage, and at least in my testing something about the damage seems off. Testing on that skill is probably a whole other post though.

For clearing, I get Innervate and Ice Bite so I cap on 2 resonance, and those extra buffs help to one shot rares. I tried setups to have all 3 but it was inconsistent at best. Storm Lance single target doesn't have any type of "gained as" so it caps all 3 resonance, because it hits quickly and does even damage across all 3 elements.

TLDR

Use a cheap Sceptre to fit Trinity. Wear an even roll Painter's gloves. Get an easy and massive damage boost to your elemental build.

Quick note I'm not sure where to put: Important gem level breakpoints are 20, 22, and 25 for 12%, 13% and 14% respectively. It can hit level 32 for 16% with a very specific setup, but I don't think it's worth going farther than level 25.

Comments

Orl-2

Nice build!

Finally got it working after removing inc to lightning damage nodes on my tree.

This seems to be the best damage enabler for Tangletounge, just stack large crits and ignore all inc to lightning elemental.

Dazzling_Week_27071

I use the Painter's Servant but my trinity not all charged just only lightning dmg. How can I fix it?

Weatherman12071

I'm using cold skills as a chrono ... would this work you reckon to boost the cold damage.. or would I be hindering myself

Betternu1

I feel like this would go so hard with the new unique chest piece that gives all 3 heralds. I believe it’s called The Coming Calamity Heroic Armour. Not sure if you would have enough damage of every type to consistently proc all the heralds but if so I’m sure it would be absolutely crazy.

BigDMZ1

What's your tooltip look like in game? My lightning damage seems to be a tad higher despite pob showing differently.

Court_esy1

If you add Crown of Eyes to make changes in Spell Damage apply to attacks and then use Threaded Light Woven Focus to increase your spell damage per spirit you will get 60k+ tooltip damage on 350-400 EDPS spears.

gyenen1

Yeah, I've been eyeing trying to put together a flicker strike monk with trinity. Sunder my enemies solves the res issue, and lead me through grace solves the spirit issue. But Trinity seemed finicky based on my brief testing with explosive grenade, so I wasn't sure how easy it would be to actually get it to balance all three.

Lordchopf1

Can you elaborate on the embitter herald and the Void-Support LS combo for Resonance?

I kill with LS and get the gained as from Volt. At the same time i will use one of my herald triggers on attack.

Because of embitter i get the same amount of gained as cold here from volt even tough they are not in the same gem group?

linh08hp1

Saved , thanks

Burningherb881

Comment to bookmark

wwow1

The damage is too low. You can get +35% extra damage with ONE support.

Siminuch1

Great explanation, was thinking about testing it on my triple element invoker.

HommitNMA1

Feels too fickle and "all-or-nothing" build...

chapman00411

I’m doing this too. Huntress enjoys spirit for soo many reasons that it makes so much sense to just go all in. There are many compelling setups for huntress, but this is definitely competitive with the best.

On a higher budget, the unique sceptre which handles your res shred and gives gain as extra fire might enable a higher performing build. Alternatively, more rare focused builds will be able to access better defensive scaling.

KaribVII1

Its insane for elemental sundering to, pretty underrated skill, has so many good multiplier gems and insane gem level scaling

SolidSnake0901

I love the element lightning so got a few questions. How is this build in the end game? Which tier can it push too? I went to get a sceptre, but it wants alot of intelligence how did you fix that?

TehRoboRoller1

Just to make sure I've understood you clearly - while mapping Innervate + Ice Bite (and maybe Embitten?) lets you perma cap two resonances, but 0 fire. And while bossing, since none of your buffs are up you automatically get an even enough split for Storm Lance to stack all 3 resonances?

Siminuch1

Trying it out on Ritualist for fun. Do you need any specific weapon mods? Or in other words, what is the BiS spear? High phs dps + elemental? Or maybe flat elemental + %increased elemental damage?

Halfken1

It's worth running even as a single element boost in many cases.

Hikaritoyamino1

IIRC in POE2 conversions can only be applied once. So the "Gain Elemental Damage" mods on painter's will be converted but skill physical to elemental conversions can't be converted again.

SAULOT_THE_WANDERER0

I didn't read the thing, but are you basically saying that if I have a painter gloves that has all gain mods with the same value, trinity builds resonance with all three elements and you never lose any as long as you don't have any other gain mod somewhere?

TG_Iceman0

Every build is lightning zzzzzzzzz